Though elites are hardly acting as one anyway. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
(To be less cryptic: As I remembered it, the murderer had more connections with the elite then it turns out. Had my memory been correct one could have argued that this murder was a symptom of french elites wanting the war. But that does not seem to be the case.) A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
Don't forget at the time nationalism had been a left-wing idea ; in 1870 the republicans were in favour of continuing the fight, against the monarchists and bonapartists who had agreed to an armistice.
Many events in France before the war can be understood as part of the war preparations against Germany : for example the Dreyfus affair started as a espionage scandal as Germany had gained access to secret artillery designs. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
